trip dispatch: the geysers

rachel and crystal take a road trip

“Man, I can’t wait to see some guh-ee-zers—”

Rachel immediately giggles as we’re pulling up to Old Faithful in Yellowstone, because I keep failing to say the word, ‘guy-ser’, which because it was spelled kind of weird and English is hard, I never learned to properly pronounce. I’ve rarely had to say this word aloud, Rachel, I say with an embarrassed smirk, because I’ve only ever said the Chinese word for that mighty and smelly water fountain spurting in front of us. I live in a text-based universe! That means I see the English words flash in my head before I say them, so I can spell everything perfectly and off gut instinct, from memory.

However, there are many words I’ve never had to say, like I can’t pronounce the differences between duo, dual, and duel, which Rachel finds hilarious. I don’t mind being the butt of the joke if it means I can be understood more.

We’re on Day 1 of our 20-day road trip through the national parks, and certainly more times lie ahead. It’s Rachel’s greatest desire and frankly prerogative to go and see all that North American nature has to offer, and she’s just getting started on the West. We walk through the tourist center so she can get her parks passports stamped; most of the ones she’s gone to already are on the East Coast. I find myself excited about Gettysburg and all the Revolutionary/Civil War architecture in the places she’s gone, similar to what’s found around our current city of New York, but I suppose it’s interesting for her to be in ‘my domain’ this time. Rachel is from Akron, Ohio, the “Midwest” of the East Coast and grew up with a penchant for singling all the coolest animals and fun facts about the lands that one could hope for. Me, I need a running commentary for this stuff to feel aligned, so I’m the perfect companion for her.

As I’m staring out the car as we venture down the winding roads, pausing to marvel at all the elk, deer, and bison that keep popping up and blocking traffic, I’m marveling at how many associations from the past come up.

I’ve pretty much done every ‘outdoors’ activity you can think of, as growing up in Oregon necessitates, but I don’t enjoy most of them. “Them?” Rachel wants to know what. I tell her about how I’ve been crabbing and clamming and camping and hiking and skiing and surfing and was clumsy and awkward at all, and was always told to shut up and enjoy the moment (much like the song “Diet Soda” by the Maine) by somebody. And so the woods are where I most drift off into fantasies and narratives I wouldn’t dare let myself entertain in the big city now. The last time I saw this many bison, I was on my own solo road trip from Missouri to North Dakota as a college sophomore, I reminisce to Rachel. Back then, the ones I saw were all on farms that I’d go to as a reporter, but I’d never been so close to one I could touch it.

It was my friend Tom from college that told me to go to North Dakota and got me acquainted with this type of landscape, I said, a tidbit Rachel finds interesting since she’s downloaded my last Substacks for the Wifi-less cabin lounging we’re going to indulge in, and Tom is in this one she’s reading now. She thinks it’s cool we’re in nature and I’m going to ‘try my hand’ at writing some pure sensory details on this trip. Unfortunately this is hard, because as I’m gazing out and scribbling down the details of the way the sunlight hits the edges of the mountains… the way the sky sprawls atop a reflective aquamarine pool… the way heat slithers out of the cracks in the ground around each geyser… I can’t do it, I have to make it mean something. Resting in the present moment is hard! Maybe too difficult, but that’s why Rachel is here.

Rachel doesn’t need this sort of melancholic elegizing I do, talking about the impermanence of everything, as much; she’s the one that taught me how to dust properly, who will draw me a bath when I’m sad, who can fix a lot of things, remembers how to pack optimally for all sorts of weather, monitors my appetite. I’ve traveled with her before, home to Ohio for Easter last spring, where it was her grandmother who pointed out I like to ‘eat often, but not a lot.’ I just get full really fast, I protest. Rachel says we’re going to do things the ‘poor white people way’ this trip, where grocery stores are sparse and the only food on site is daily $25 mediocre chicken sandwiches. We stock up 40 miles out from our lodge on all sorts of proteins and carbs, from sardines to peppers to Lays plain chips to eat with tomato salsa and Korean barbecue beef jerky and sure I’ll take some bananas but fuck there’s no fridge so I can’t eat yogurt… oh my god…

The next day, while scurrying for Wifi so I could take a couple work calls, I notice there’s a microwave in the main lounge a 10 min walk away and grit my teeth. It’s okay, I don’t need the meat… Rachel’s vegetarian and is used to watching her diet to balance out what she eats, while it seems I’ll have to retire my Asian takeout habit in favor of munching on nuts and vacuum sealed string cheese. We spend $400 — not bad for 2 weeks and 2 people. We’ll see how this goes.

Rachel’s trying to fix me, to be honest. She’s the first close friend I’ve gone on a road trip with in some years, as these are ritualistic acts of intimacy for me that bring up irrational feelings of vulnerability. There was a time where I spent most of my time with my car alone, driving 16 hours solo both ways between North Dakota and Missouri. Road tripping became a necessity in my college and LA years, where I visited 25 states in 7 years at some point. You’ll see at my most neurotic and fragile, pausing to comment on helpless I feel before the Big Other of all sorts of things that can hurt me or awe me.

Rachel is of the mind on the other hand, that entropy is the coolest thing about all of this. Momentum continues, no matter what. “Change is constant, Crystal!” she says while we walk past the “Blood Geyser,” pointing at the cheesy caption detailing the ways this geyser moves. "Mother Earth, so temperamental,” we chime. She’s really particular about how she wants to express herself, like most women. And yet, it is true that, just as the little thermomile microcosms that live in the hot geysers mirror some of life’s earliest forms, contrasted with how us humans are now the most complex ones to exist so far yet can’t join them because it’d burn us alive… it just shows how everything is cyclical, ya know?

This idea sticks with me, as I think of how much witness the land itself has bore to billions of people over these years, what wisdom it could possibly give me while it’s busy padding on and on… everything here took hundreds of years to form, and yet evolves every decade. The Old Faithful I see now is not the same sulphuric new friend I made in 2008, when my family and I came and it was the last happy summer I had before I became extremely depressed.

As we walk past rows of lodgepole pines, pause to record different bird calls to see if her AI app can figure out which ones they are, and comment on all the different color combinations of sulfuric acid art, I can’t help but feel a rush, a pleasure that you can’t really get in the city. A muted feeling of awe, which I’ve had to learn to tamper down inside of me because then I’d be way too excited about everything. So it goes that I’m also the one here who won’t let myself feel, commentate, do much of anything out in these wild expanses. I’m staring at a crystalline lake and trying to smile, get myself to feel comfortable here and not brace for some reflexive corrective comment of whether I’m enjoying myself correctly.

Rachel shakes her head. But she’s fine with all this, because honestly she’s a big reason I bother with going to some of the ‘cliche’ cultural experiences I usually have just felt ‘not normal enough’ or something to go do, like when she tells me and Izzy let’s go to the Met so she can explain the exhibits to me, insists on taking a group to Tristan und Isolde because we need to do opera more so Crystal won’t fall asleep (unfortunately this time didn’t succeed), suggests a girl’s sleepover where we can make friendship bracelets and paint jars, offers to take heels classes with me and teach me shibari so I can stop feeling so sexually unobserved...

While in the car, we have our typical lilting conversations that cover random topics under the sun, but also boil down thematically to our shared life of psychotypology. Rachel is an ESFJ but extremely dialed in to her intuitive side; she’s made it her job recently to educate as many tpot individuals in Jungian functions as she can, which I learned earlier is a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, she persists, and I get to eat of the fruit her actions bear, so who am I to complain.

Rachel and I both co-organize “vibechella,” the official afters for vibe camp, of which she is COO. We’re both known for being the ‘mommy’ figures in our little corner of the Twitterverse, mostly because New York is a central schilling point for tpot, as I hosted multiple picnics here when I first moved there in 2022 and Rachel became vital infrastucture later when she joined the scene in 2024, as she’d already been to most of the Europot camps and knew a lot of people from the group chats, but had been stuck in DC until she could afford to get a place. Our matriarch statuses are probably related to being excluded purposefully from the sexual economy of this thousand-person scene. Rachel has been in a long term serious relationship for a few years now, and even before that was heavily involved with a guy from London tpot; I myself rarely date and have notably not been sexually entangled with anyone from the scene since joining. My lore is perennially carefully bookmarked between a few men who wouldn’t ring a bell for most people in the scene, and I plan to maintain this level of discretion, as I’ve noted people poking their noses around my business more and more (Recently: “I have no idea what your type is, Crystal, like what? How is this possible?” Warren heckled me, while Jason said, “Crystal loves God too much to give that away, right man?”) Nonetheless, Rachel says she will model how I want a man to treat me so she can teach him once I have one. And since her favorite project is understanding everyone she loves, she made sure to emphasize that reading my Substack made her understand the stories of my life in a way she couldn’t even in direct conversation. That’s refreshing.

I said my goal with this project, besides making a surreal serialized universe for people to enjoy like a reality TV show, was for anyone who wanted to understand me to be able to have a shot at it, for all of us are full of untold stories that define us in our best and worst moments, which is a cliche sentiment yet the truest thing I’ve always believed.

Well, fuck. This piece seems to be a bit more about Rachel and my autobiografiction experiment. Oh well. Rachel did tell me that I pack a lot of sensory detail in to my pieces, more than I realize, and that maybe my former mentor Tom wasn’t that important to want to emulate. She asks if I ever had a crush on Tom, because based on how I wrote about him in “Doubting Thomas” it’s hard to tell. I said it’s probably hard for her to tell because I also could not tell. I honestly did not though. I idolized Tom’s style because I knew I could emulate it, but there wasn’t much eroticism in copying him because Tom and I were too similar. His prose’s influence on me felt more scholarly than passionate. Really, I always wanted someone who could yank the feelings out of me from a number of quiet ways yet also yearn for attention and validation more openly, the thing I’d most disavowed in myself.

Tom did say back in the day I was always better at conveying a higher meaning of a scene though, where I could make even boring city council meetings sound interesting, and that his reporting fit an old world more but he saw romanticizing things would start to become a scarcer and scarcer skill. In 2026, Tom currently covers the natural order of things, finding people ‘too complicated’ to even set foot in the arena where I battle for THE SOULS DUH of my city and the friends I’ve made along the way. I need an ally in a new world, even an unexpected one…

But on the other hand, Rachel is really actually curious about the second person in that piece, Tommy. He was always someone she’d wondered about, and I note this is yet another 2024 theme come back to haunt us. Already some characteristics of summer 2026 and summer 2024 add up astrologically, but it’s still crazy to see the applications. Such as how our mutual friend Adrian, mostly someone we associated with the downtown lit scene/Dimes Square era, had come back into both of our lives after coming out of a self-imposed love boat exile and wants to hang out more. Rachel was moving to NYC that summer of the Hegelian e-girls, which was when I myself met Adrian while planning a party for the three non-New Yorkers. When I wasn’t planning that party (that moved locations way too many times), she saw me in bed day and night in a ketamine-induced haze of pain over the Tommy fallout, and had never quite understood the extent of the story until now.

No one [in our friend group] knew why you were so obsessed with him, she said, because to all of us, you by all counts were out of his league, like he’s just some Midwestern dude who’s kind of antisocial and tries to be the good boy. What about him was special? The power of someone caring about your inner world, I said dryly. Tommy might not have been able to understand most of my frameworks, but what he demonstrably excelled at was showing interest in all these details about me. My own narcissistic proclivity, to be so desperate for true focused attention. Ideally I can find someone with both, which is why I put him there, I said as I watched some squirrels chase each other up a tree. The wistful confession is the story had felt concealed in me for so long that I was beginning to feel like I had made everything up, and exorcising it onto paper and trying to make it real ended up making me feel more crazy anyway. Because it’s a mystery to everyone who sees my exterior why iconic Crystal Duan went crazy over some nobody that no one ever knew, see me breaking down at parties and be too humiliated to go outside for months, and the subsequent John infatuation was somehow even more embarrassing because I desperately wanted John to have been the thing I was wrong about with Tommy.

I wrote the Tommy part first, actually, I say, but it made me think also of Tom, who saw everything except for the people in front of him, or so we thought. So Tom started writing those vignettes at the end of college, as if regretting he’d never written anything down about people he tried to love. And the thing about Tommy was he would never forget about the people in front of him, even ones that betrayed him. He always tried to see the people in front of him and that’s why I fell for him — he didn’t write, but he saw. And I had thought about the kind of guy that could both see other people and write the really iconic things too… that was what I wanted.

I really don’t have feelings for Tommy anymore, though. The only thing that makes me hurt now is remembering sometimes how he memorized every number in my 26 things I hate about you birthday card I gave him, how it was the best gift he’s ever gotten, how he recited all of it from memory, and it substituted for the idea that my words matter to everyone . Maybe I’d never really known him, but what I’d known was the desired feeling of remembering me, was correct (“at least after him you sterted picking people that act like real people,” Yanick said once).

I’m high and realize I’ve been chattering for the entire 30 minute hike we’re on. Oh, whatever. Now it’s lunch time, because we’ve wandered back down the muddy ish trails and taken pictures of all 10+ of the geysers and now I need to gourge myself on a burger. Rachel munches on a huckleberry float that we both agree is way too sweety and syrupy, which prompts me to disclose to her how I’ve only taken medicine for being sick like five times in my life, making her jaw drop. It’s times like these that are fun for me to tell someone who’s paying attention.

We try to type everything around us as well, going beyond just the personality type stuff, although we do start with that. All the people who use Fe and Ti and Ne and Si love France, I say, referencing how Rachel herself routes her philosophical lineage through there, which is similar to our INTP friend Charlotte who lived there for many years. This is because they’re existentially snobs and obsessed with the sensuality, I snort. But Rachel says she can’t say I’m wrong… I love Japan for the opposite reasons, where it’s Te and Fi and obsessed with order and a cheerful face that will stay on through all sorts of bullshit and tear you apart in private later.

Now on to typing other things. We circle past the “Heart” and the Mud Pots and I explain my signature self-mythologizing bullshit as the weed starts to alter my inhibitions. I have decided I write a ‘bourgeoisie Substack’ — I gave up on growing it, and now I want it to be the one that only some people read, the elites that will use it to change others’ lives, but where the small audience lends it its sense of authenticity. On the other hand, I used to crave writing a ‘proletariat Substack’ — the one that everyone reads, that gets all the attention, but ultimately becomes a prisoner of its own mass success, while I want my insights to stay homegrown and only discernible to people that can do something with a bigger platform but which have paid costs that are inverse to saying the things that must be said. This just brings us to a fundamental thing that bonds me and Rachel: we are both hopecore nihilists — a distinct difference from ‘nihilistic hopecore’, we are actually more identified with the idea that nothing really matters, so hope is a true hobby, almost an aesthetic that could be rendered as a ‘dialectical truth’ but only after sublated from its way-too-raw initial essence (why people think hope is cringe is usually because we’re only on the Thesis phase, not the sublation). Rachel said she became obsessed with this idea in high school of helping 5000 people, and then when they help 5000 people each etc. setting off a chain reaction. I arrived at similar goals through religion, but more so because I wanted to spite Man’s cynicism than to even help the other people. I wanted to do some sort of ideological demonstration, where people would see my life as a testament to some sort of transgressive truth, the idea that we should care for the sport of it… not out of libidinal dependency but from audacious surrender…

I screech when I notice how tall the geysers guy-sers keep springing, and Rachel loves this.

At the end of the day Rachel asks when we can do the Spinoza discussion she’s been dying to have with me and I say the nine hour drive will be a good time for that.